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Re: Goodbye

Author: seabreeze
Date: 2015-05-28 22:49

I know Kell's album "Swing Low Sweet Clarinet" and appreciate his efforts to popularize the instrument. Listening to opera singers, Kell was moved to achieve a vocal effect on the clarinet. He certainly was a distinctive stylist, and instantly recognizable. Most American classical players objected to his use of vibrato and his tendency toward rubato but some, like Mitchell Lurie, found a great deal to admire in Kell's approach, though they never cared to emulate it.

Lurie nearly always played with a very straight tone without a trace of vibrato and was solidly metrical and not given to rubato at all, yet he wrote a very appreciative piece on Lurie for the Clarinet magazine soon after the death of the British artist. No one has ever duplicated Kell's tone which was rather bright and incisive rather than the dark, more hollow quality many players want today. Reportedly he played on a Wardell mouthpiece with a big A-shaped tone chamber on his Boosey & Hawkes and used the "thinnest reeds that he dared." He certainly was never part of the "homogenized mass," even among British players.

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